We sealed this understanding in a long embrace.
An hour later my father, Yana, and I stepped into a landau at the door.
It was one of those enervating equinoctial days when the warmth and the intense quietness affect one almost to tears. The sun, in a beautiful Flemish sky of pale, soft turquoise, had dispersed the morning mist.
"Look at him, sir," said Yana, pointing to me; "he is as happy as a king!"
"Now is the time to take in a plentiful supply of air," remarked my father; "one only needs to open one's mouth!"
I opened mine quite wide, as if I were yawning.
What a difference, too, between this air and the air at school; even that which one breathed out of doors in the cloistered court, shut in by four forbidding high walls, sweating with damp and decaying with mildew.
Seated with my back to the coachman, my hands on my father's knee, I uttered exclamations of surprise and besieged him with questions. He sat back in the carriage, shielded from the wind by his big overcoat. Yana sat beside him; Lion ran on in advance.
Passing along the chief street of the suburb, we came out into the open country. The tufts of young leaves gave a sweet freshness to the hoary trunks of the great beech-trees which lined the road. In place of the yellow withered grass in the meadows, there was a vivid emerald carpet; splendid cows, with well-rounded flanks and dewlaps reaching the ground, nibbled the tender shoots. The full rows of young corn promised a plentiful harvest. Between a double hedge of weeping-willows and alders ran silvery waters, swollen by the melting of the late snows. When we passed a flower-garden the scent of lilac filled the dreamy air. Gates with gilt knobs opened on avenues of elms and oaks; sloping lawns led up to a castle, whose terrace was ornamented with clipped and modeled orange-trees. The majestic passing of a pair of big swans or the scurry of hare-brained ducks stirred the stagnant pond, and left wakes amid the flags and water-lilies.
Moss-grown farmsteads, flanked by barns with green shutters fixed to the red bricks, draw-wells, chickens picking about on the manure-heaps,—these were my chief delight. Sometimes a countryman's cart with its white awning stood on one side for us to pass.